When you’re a billionaire, you don’t need a Blackberry

T. Boone Pickens was just here this afternoon. There’ll be more on that later, including some video from Barbara.

But anyway, we were all talking about how he now owns 10 million shares of Yahoo but doesn’t really know what Yahoo does (he’s piggybacking on Carl Icahn’s campaign to throw out the current management). He started talking about how he doesn’t really know what a Blackberry does either. That caused me to look at my Blackberry, where a WSJ Tech Alert headline had just popped up: “Icahn Takes Another Swipe at Yahoo.”

I told Pickens about it, hoping that this would demonstrate to him the Amazing Transformative Power of Modern Communication Technologies. He wanted to know more. I read a little bit of the story, which involved a new letter Icahn had sent to Yahoo criticizing the company’s executive severance plan.

“Oh, they read that letter to me 30 minutes ago,” he said dismissively.